Archive for the 'Software' Category

Most people have Microsoft Office installed either through school or through work as we can not get away from it.  It’s actually one of the few products that Microsoft makes that is absolutely necessary even in a Microsoft free environment (that’s why you absolutely NEED alternatives like Open Office or even Office for Mac).  Everyone is of course familiar with MS Word, MS Excel (god how I dread thee sometimes), and of course Power Point.  The one application that secretly got snuck in that NO ONE knows about is Microsoft OneNote.  It is perhaps one of the greatest applications created in recent memory that I can not believe people do not use.

The application is very simplistic in nature, you have a virtual notebook with sections in it (remember your 5-Star notebooks in school with subject separation?).  Each of these sections can have as many pages as you wish and everything is searchable.  When I say everything I mean EVERYTHING.  Any text on an image will get OCR’d internally and become searchable.  Hand written notes (provided you have a wacom tablet or a tablet pc) are also searchable as internally they get converted to text.  The best part about this is the pages are non-bounded.  You can literally write, copy and paste, insert, etc any where into the page.  OneNote also has hooks into Windows where a Windows Key+S will provide snag-it like functionality.  You can also write/type over anything you can import (which pretty much everything is either in PDF, Word, or can be “printed” into OneNote with a virtual printer).  In essence this is literally the notebook we use and write in everyday when we take notes during meetings, classes, or “todo” lists.

For a tablet pc this of course is indispensible, most of us write notes everyday.  Heck, it’s much easier to write short hand than type generally and god forbid you have to quickly scribble a quick graph or algorithm/formula.  Having all of that inside in a searchable format is truly heaven.  If any of you are like me, you’ve likely saved your college notes somewhere and wouldn’t it be nice to have them in virtual format as well?

As far as I know, other than EverNote there is no comparison to OneNote.  Sadly, OneNote is likely the only program that would keep me from switching over to any other operating system as it is THAT good.  There are other programs LIKE OneNote, but nothing remotely compares.   When Open Office one day creates an alternative I’ll be the first one to test it out, but that will be unlikely as sadly Microsoft is the only company that offers complete support of tablets.

I’ve spent the last two months or so working on websites for various endeavors  and I’ve gotten to REALLY enjoy CakePHP.  So much so that dare I say that web development is now fun again!  In the olden days (about 5-6 years ago) we had to code up our own libraries to connect your website to MySQL and create queries, headers, etc.  With a good PHP framework, we can now spend more time coding and less time dealing with the intricacies of just getting your DB connections working (ie: more fun coding the working pieces vs the supporting pieces).

I’ve evaluated both CakePHP and Symfony and I liked both for various reasons.  I have found that the Symfony framework is just overly complicated when building a website that isn’t necessarily enterprise level from the get go.  To add insult to the injury, the framework isn’t thoroughly documented.  I found it extremely difficult to find something as basic as options for methods and the associated values that the options can contain.  Asking the forums just got overly redundant and thus required me to manually go through the framework code.  This isn’t too bad, but just took way too much time.  Isn’t time saving the reason why I chose a framework?

CakePHP on the other hand is very well documented.  In fact, the documentation is so good that you can get up and running in a few hours.  While the ORM isn’t as detailed as Symfony, I didn’t have to learn a whole new language in order to create simple queries.  CakePHP, to me just, just fits the PHP mindset better.  If you understand the MVC model and PHP, you probably can get the ball rolling in CakePHP within the hour.

Having said that, the testing utility in Symfony is amazing and the fact that you can develop offline using Symfony by using the built in models works really nicely too.  CakePHP is still faster for me for developing and creating databases and tables in MySQL using PHPMyAdmin is much more intuitive than hand coding everything in Symfony using Doctrine.

Apparently the early gripes with CakePHP were about HABTM tables, but those are now fixed in at least CakePHP 1.3.  The documentation in CakePHP as well as the support community on IRC is much more complete than Symfony.  This leads to a much faster development time and less downtime when you are stuck for an answer.

Overall CakePHP 1.3 is the clear winner in my book for development of the majority of the websites out there.  If you need enterprise level code Symfony might work for you, but I’m fairly certain the majority of the developers will develop from scratch to accomplish complete security and thorough code auditing.

iTunes in itself isn’t a bad media player or organizer, but the lack of FAST folder scanning and auto-updating really makes it unusable for a large collection of music.   MediaMonkey fixes ALL the short-comings of iTunes and then some. 

Since MediaMonkey bases it’s entire library on ID3 tags FIRST, changing filenames/folders/etc doesn’t affect the library at all.  Once you set the software to monitor a folder, it will scan/update itself upon startup.  This is VERY helpful as I have folders setup as sorted and unsorted.  My unsorted folder is for discs that I have not had time to create all the tags yet, but sometimes I want to listen to the song right away.  If I later change the folder in which it belongs to (to sorted) I don’t have to worry about breaking/not finding the songs on my player or even playlists!

Synching with the iPhone is quite simple as well.  You’ll still need to install iTunes on your computer for the drivers, but that’s it! Like in iTunes, all I do is synch my MediaMonkey playlists to my iPhone and it’ll always synch/update itself.  This is great as my playlists are always updated and updated.  Unlike iTunes, if the filename of the song changes/etc I don’t have to worry about iTunes removing the music off my iPhone.

Lastly, the speed of MediaMonkey is simply amazing.  It searches, organizes, caches searches so much quicker than iTunes that I’m not sure how I lived without it previously.  It seriously is the ultimate music media player for Windows!

Back in 2004, it was the start of the blogging craze.  Since I figured it would be a shame to lose the posts that I created 6 years ago (no matter how retarded they were), I decided to import the data into my Wordpress more for archival purposes.

I used the rebol scripts from http://www.timwylie.com/xword.html to export the data from Xanga into Wordpress importable xml.  The process was simple and I didn’t need to install anything to do this.  Just follow the steps listed on the site and have viola!

Being roughly 1683 miles away from Jenny kind of sucks sometimes. Talking on the phone goes only so far and sometimes I just want to see her do her silly antics -=)

So being the tech whore that I am, I convinced myself to buy an iSight for myself and a Logitech QuickCam® for Notebooks Pro for Jenny.

We’ve spent most of yesterday playing with different video conferencing software. With both of us being behind a router, it wasn’t easy finding a good solution without having her learn how to port forward.

Here’s a list of the free clients (with some pros and cons) we’ve tried.

Ichat AV/Aim 5.9
– This worked great for me and some of my other buddies but, for whatever reason I could not get this to work with Jenny’s computer. This was probally the most preferable solution for me since I could use my Powerbook instead of having to jump on my PC to chat with her.

After about an hour of fiddling around with our router settings, I gave up and tried the iSight with Windows XP. Windows definately detects the iSight as a Firewire Camera but, due to the lack of driver I could not get sound with it. This was fine as I’ve been using my Plantronics DSP-500 for sound since I haven’t hooked up the speakers to my computer in a while.

These next clients were for Windows Only.

Skype with the Video4IM Plugin

– Although the iSight was detected using a generic driver, this also meant that you couldn’t adjust any of the settings. The default brightness on the generic driver was way too bright. I had to download a program called Iccapture to play around with the settings as Video4IM lacked any sort of adjustment. The quality was very good after the iccapture adjustments and it even used our Skype logins! The program was very painless and used Skypes methods to break through firewalls (which was what we wanted).

Eyeball Chat
– This is currently our favorite client. It has adjustability for the webcam, which was great since Iccapture was a 3rd party pay program. The video quality was actually better than Video4IM and had the same break through firewall idea. It also allows you to log into AIM, MSN, and Yahoo just like GAIM.

The two webcams we’ve used are much better than the old school logitechs that most of us probally used in the past. I believe they are using CCD instead of the crappy CMOS sensors and the quality definately shows. Until bandwith increases or someone develops some crazy new compression algorithm, I’m not sure if the quality that we’re seeing will get any better. I can’t wait until Skype unveils their video conferencing solution. I hope they can do the same for video conferencing as what they have done for voice communication.

Looks like Comcast in Philadelphia isn’t as saturated as I thought. I’m averaging about 5 mbps and have hit up to 7.3 mbps a few times during peak hours (wow!). Not too bad for $29.99/month.

Since I finally configured my network again, I’ll probally upload the Cali pictures real soon. I saw an iphoto gallery plugin that I really want to test out. Keep posted!

Speaking of networks, I finally bought a network printer (Dell 1600n). The cool thing is that you can scan, print, and fax through the network. No more carrying my printer from computer to computer (j/k!). The cheaper printing costs are also very welcomed.